OpenAI to buy cybersecurity startup Promptfoo to safeguard AI agents

OpenAI said Monday it has acquired the cybersecurity startup promptProviding tools to help maintain and test complex AI systems.

The company, led by Sam Altman, did not disclose the terms of the deal but did say that the Promptfoo team would join OpenAI. Promptfoo’s security tools will be brought to OpenAI’s Frontier platform for AI agents.

“As AI agents become increasingly connected to real data and systems, securing and validating them has become more challenging and important than ever before,” Promptfoo CEO Ian Webster said in a statement. he said. “Joining OpenAI allows us to accelerate this work, bringing stronger safety, security and governance capabilities to the teams building real-world AI systems.”

OpenAI also said it will continue building out its popular open-source project Promptfoo, which allows developers to test a variety of AI-related prompts and agents and compare the performance of major language models like ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and others. GoogleGemini.

OpenAI has been engulfing startups and tech executives in recent months in the hypercompetitive artificial intelligence market, where it competes with companies like Anthropic, Google and others. Meta.

In January, OpenAI acquired health technology startup Torch for approximately $60 million, CNBC reported. This deal comes after OpenAI announced in October that it was acquiring startup Software Applications, which creates an AI interface called Sky for Apple Mac users.

In February, OpenAI hired Peter Steinberger, who created the popular OpenClaw tool that developers use to build AI agents.

“A genius with a lot of great ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for humans,” Altman said in an X post at the time. “We expect this to quickly become a staple of our product offerings.”

Promptfoo announced In July, it announced that it had raised an $18.4 million Series A funding round led by Insight Partners and including Andreessen Horowitz.

The startup has 11 employees and has raised a total of $22.68 million at a post-money valuation of $85.5 million as of July 2025, according to deal tracking service Pitchbook.

Andreessen Horowitz is leaning into the infrastructure and defense markets and last said in January that it had raised $15 billion as part of its “American Dynamism” financing efforts.

The venture capital firm said $6.75 billion of that raise will be allocated to a growth fund, while two other funds worth $1.7 billion will focus on applications and infrastructure, respectively.

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